Benefitfocus Healthcare Video Portal Merges Community with Credibility

icyou offers a free online healthcare video and information sharing community

Today Benefitfocus announced the release of the next phase on Beta site icyou which merges the healthcare video and virtual communities with credibility. This user-generated health video community provides the ability to post and search healthcare videos, as well as communicate with other users on important healthcare topics. Originally launched in September 2007, icyou already has hundreds of videos posted weekly and has rapidly become one of the most diverse libraries of online healthcare videos.

Built around common health concerns, such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity, icyou features a blend of amateur and professional video and is quickly growing as patients, caregivers, doctors and experts upload and share their healthcare stories. In addition, high-quality videos are produced and compiled internally by the icyou editorial staff who, to ensure that content is both accurate and reliable, work with medical editors and contributing physicians to review videos posted to the site

Cleveland Clinic Collaborates with Google

Cleveland Clinic Pilots New Google Offering to Provide Patients Broader Access to Their Medical Records
Cleveland Clinic, a world-class academic medical institution and leader in health information technology, today announced a collaboration with Google, the world's leading Internet search company, to pilot features and services of a new health offering from Google. The Google offering, not yet publicly available, will assist providers like Cleveland Clinic to create a new kind of healthcare experience that puts the patient in charge of his or her own health information.

Today, more than 100,000 Cleveland Clinic patients benefit from Cleveland Clinic's electronic personal health record (PHR) system called eCleveland Clinic MyChart(R). The pilot, an invitation-only opportunity offered to a group of Cleveland Clinic PHR users, plans to enroll between 1,500 and 10,000 patients. It will test secure exchange of patient medical record data such as prescriptions, conditions and allergies between their Cleveland Clinic PHR to a secure Google profile in a live clinical delivery setting. The ultimate goal of this patient-centered and controlled model is to give patients the ability to interact with multiple physicians, healthcare service providers and pharmacies.